Derby Racecourse Roman settlement

The Derby Racecourse Roman settlement was a civilian industrial quarter and cemetery on the eastern side of Derby, about 600 metres east of the Roman fort at Little Chester. The fort was called Derventio. The settlement sat on the Roman road that left the fort and ran east toward Sawley, where the Derwent meets the Trent. It is a scheduled monument.

The ground is a fort-vicus, the kind of extramural settlement that grew up against a garrison, and such settlements are uncommon: fewer than sixty have been identified in Britain, almost all of them in frontier districts where a fully formed town was slow to appear. This one is counted among only two well-preserved vici in Derbyshire. People settled in places of this sort to sell goods and services to soldiers who were paid in coin. Their presence is one of the marks that town life, which Roman government used as its ordinary frame, had taken hold beside the fort.

The same ground is also described as a small Town, the third Roman settlement in the Derby area. One account treats the racecourse site itself as that town. Another keeps the name Derventio for the fort and the later walled settlement at Little Chester, and describes the racecourse only as the fort-vicus on the Sawley road, where pottery was made and iron was worked. Both accounts put the industrial ground 600 metres east of the fort.

The modern playing fields cover it. Goalposts that stand inside the protected area are left out of the scheduling, which is a statement about the legal boundary and not a rule for visitors.

What the place was for changed with the fort it served. While the garrison was new, the kilns supplied it. When pottery-making stopped, smithing continued on the abandoned potters' ground. The cemetery received the dead of the vicus and of the fort, including people buried with military dress-fittings.

The excavated sample has already produced evidence for the size, ages, sexes, and wealth of that population, and most of the protected ground has still not been dug. That is why the place is treated as having considerable archaeological potential even after several seasons of excavation.

The tribe of this stretch of country is not agreed. One account says the Cornovii held it. Another says it is not known which group occupied the area of Derby, and that the Corieltauvi and the Cornovii are the most likely. The Corieltauvi, also called the Coritani and the Corieltavi, lived in the East Midlands.

The Brigantes lay to their north, the Cornovii to their west, the Dobunni and the Catuvellauni to the south, and the Iceni to the east. Their capital was Ratae Corieltauvorum, now Leicester. There is little sign that they resisted Rome: Ratae was taken about AD 44 and may have held a garrison. The Fosse Way, Watling Street, and Ermine Street crossed their territory.

Their name is written Coritani and Coritavi in Ptolemy's Geography, while an inscribed tile from Churchover gives the administrative district as the civitas of the Corieltauvi, which is the form now preferred. In 2014, twenty-six gold and silver coins of the tribe were found in Reynard's Kitchen Cave in Derbyshire. A list of their early military sites includes the fort at Little Chester, described there as a fort of perhaps Neronian date succeeded by a small walled town on the same spot.

The Cornovii lived principally in Cheshire, Shropshire, north Staffordshire, north Herefordshire, and the eastern parts of Flintshire, Powys, and Wrexham. Their likely pre-Roman centre was the hillfort on the Wrekin. Under Rome their capital was Viroconium Cornoviorum at Wroxeter, which grew into the fourth largest town in the province and was at its most prosperous in the second and third centuries. They were bordered by the Brigantes to the north and the Corieltauvi to the east, so Derby sits near the seam between the two.

A road from Middlewich toward Derby passed the small town at Chesterton near Newcastle-under-Lyme, on what had been a possible earlier fort. The supply road that ran from Wroxeter toward Rossington is the line along which the first Derby fort is said, in one account, to have been planted. The two tribal names are therefore both in play, and the disagreement is left standing: Cornovii in one account of this ground, and an open choice between Corieltauvi and Cornovii in the account of Derventio itself.

Before the kilns, people were already here or close by. Three sherds of Iron Age pottery and a triangular clay loomweight were found in features of Roman date on the racecourse, which is evidence of Iron Age settlement in the vicinity even though the objects had been shifted into later pits and ditches. In the cemetery, a few further pieces of Iron Age pottery came from ground that looked like an older occupational or agricultural soil, or perhaps a buildup beside the road, but none of the features there could be shown to be pre-Roman. When the cemetery was laid out, the ground appears to have been clear.

The Roman conquest of Britain began in earnest in AD 43 under the emperor Claudius, after Julius Caesar's expeditions in 55 and 54 BC had left a system of tribute, hostages, and client kings. By AD 40 the Catuvellauni had taken the kingdom of the Atrebates and expelled Verica, a king Rome recognised. His exile was the pretext. Aulus Plautius, a senator who had been suffect consul in 29 and had probably governed Pannonia, was given the command.

He served as the first governor of the new province from 43 to 46. The force is reckoned as four legions, the Ninth Hispana, the Second Augusta under the future emperor Vespasian, the Fourteenth Gemina, and the Twentieth Valeria Victrix, with about 20,000 auxiliaries, among them Thracians and Batavians. On the shore of northern Gaul the troops refused to cross the Ocean. Claudius's freedman Narcissus addressed them, and they answered with the Saturnalia shout, because a former slave was speaking in their commander's place.

The mutiny ended. The landing is generally placed at Richborough in Kent, though other landings have been argued. The Britons under Togodumnus and Caratacus of the Catuvellauni avoided a pitched battle until Plautius defeated Caratacus at the Medway and Togodumnus at the Thames. Togodumnus died soon after.

Plautius halted and sent for Claudius, who arrived with elephants and heavy artillery, took Camulodunum, and claimed the surrender of eleven British kings. A province was formed, and Plautius was left to govern it.

One account of Derby says that in 46 and 47 the army under Plautius had probably occupied the lands south of the Trent, so that in AD 50 this was the front line. The wider narrative of the conquest says that by AD 47 the Romans held the lands southeast of the Fosse Way, which runs from the Devon coast toward Lincoln and has often been discussed as a desired early frontier because it links the Severn country with the Trent. Written history for these years is thin, and the forts are dated from excavation. Plautius's own career ends his governorship in 46.

His successor was in place in the winter of 47. The Derby accounts still attach the occupation south of the Trent to Plautius's army in 46 and 47, and that wording is kept beside the governorship dates.

Publius Ostorius Scapula governed Britain from the winter of 47 until he died in 52. He had been suffect consul, probably in 46. Tribes that hoped a new governor would not campaign so late in the year attacked, and he answered at once. He is understood, from a repaired passage in the Annals, to have declared that he would disarm the Britons south and east of the Trent and the Severn.

In 48 he campaigned against the Deceangli of north-east Wales and through the Cheshire Gap, a move that separated the peoples of the north from those of Wales, and he was called east by unrest among the Brigantes. A few of those who had armed were killed and the rest pardoned. Troops of the Fourteenth were stationed to keep the Brigantian peace. At that time the Second Augusta is placed in the south-east, the Ninth beyond the Trent in the north-east, the Twentieth at Colchester, and the Fourteenth at Wroxeter.

In 49 he founded the veteran colony at Camulodunum and probably a municipium at Verulamium. The mineral wealth of Britain lay outside the already conquered lowlands, and he did not live to take it.

Caratacus, a prince of the Catuvellauni, had survived the first defeat and reappeared as a leader of the Silures in what is now south-east Wales. The Silures were a powerful people, bordered by the Ordovices, the Dobunni, and the Demetae, and they resisted from about AD 48. Ostorius spent years against them and against the Ordovices. Caratacus led the Silures and then moved to the Ordovices, where he was brought to battle in AD 51, probably near the Severn and possibly near Caersws.

His wife and daughter were captured, his brother surrendered, and he fled to the Brigantes. Their queen, Cartimandua, handed him to the Romans in chains. Ostorius received triumphal decorations. He had also said the Silures should be exterminated or transplanted.

They fought harder, cut off a legionary force that was building forts, took prisoners, and shared those prisoners among neighbouring peoples so that the resistance would hold together. Ostorius died in 52, said to have been worn out by care, with the Silures still unconquered. They then defeated a legion led by Gaius Manlius Valens. Aulus Didius Gallus replaced him.

Sextus Julius Frontinus is the governor credited with subduing the Silures in campaigns ending about AD 78. Their town, Venta Silurum at Caerwent, was established in AD 75.

It was in these years that the first fort at Derby was built, and the dates do not agree. The account of Strutt's Park says the fort was built around the year 50, under Duffield Road and Belper Road, to protect a river crossing. Less than a mile to the south, the north-south road later called Ryknild Street crossed the Derwent. Another road, the Long Lane, ran west toward Wroxeter and Chester, and a third, the Street, crossed the Peak toward Buxton and Manchester.

In that account the fort was planted when Aulus Didius Gallus, successor of Ostorius, had brought the Welsh borders under control but had not pushed further north or west, and it stood not far south of the border with the Brigantes, who were then an allied or subject kingdom. A different account places Strutt's Park among the new forts of late 47, on the supply road from Wroxeter to Rossington, during the campaign of Ostorius against the tribes of Wales and the Cheshire Gap. A third account, of the fort it calls the Little Chester fort, puts that fort on high ground west of the Derwent in Strutt's Park and dates it late in Claudius's reign or early in Nero's, probably during the campaigns of Aulus Didius Gallus between 52 and 57, from surface coins and pottery.

The end of Strutt's Park is told in the same several ways. One account says it was replaced, probably between 75 and 80, by a new fort at Little Chester on the opposite bank. Another says it was vacated in AD 80 when Derventio was built. The fort west of the river is also said to have been carefully dismantled, the timber barracks taken down, and the place abandoned perhaps during the early campaigns of Quintus Petillius Cerialis around 71.

First-century pottery and coins of Nero and Vespasian have been found in two gullies there, on the west bank facing Little Chester, and that is described as the first positive evidence of first-century occupation on the suspected early fort. The site was buried under a housing estate before it could be fully examined. Excavation in the 1970s found the slots of timber barrack blocks. A few pieces of bronze military equipment from the site are standard issue and do not name the unit, though some pieces were gilded, which has been taken to hint at a more prestigious regiment, perhaps a cavalry ala or a legionary cohort.

A first report of the fort appeared in 1967. Excavations in 1995 found terracing, a stone wall footing, and a cobbled pavement. The pottery from those digs is held partly by the Trent and Peak Archaeological Trust and partly at Derby Museum.

The road that matters for the racecourse is the one that left the later fort toward the Trent. Icknield Street, also called Ryknild Street, is the Roman road that runs from the Fosse Way at Bourton-on-the-Water to Templeborough, passing Alcester, Birmingham, Lichfield, Burton upon Trent, and Derby. The name Ryknild Street was given in the fourteenth century by Ranulf Higden, who traced a road from St David's toward the mouth of the Tyne by way of Derby. From Little Chester northward the course has not been fixed.

What is certain is that a road left Derventio to the east and led to Sawley on the Trent, and that Icknield Street branched from that road toward the north-east. The line is clear again beyond Breadsall, about a mile and a half from Little Chester. One view doubts that Ryknild Street ever went to Strutt's Park, and instead makes the road contemporary with the later fort at Chester Green, which replaced Strutt's Park around AD 80. Sawley, whose older name was Sallé, stands at the junction of the Derwent and the Trent and commanded the first crossing of the Trent above Nottingham.

The Roman road's destination is that crossing, not the later toll bridge of 1790.

After Ostorius, the western war continued while the Derwent forts are described as holding a quiet frontier. Quintus Veranius became governor in 57, replacing Aulus Didius Gallus. He had governed Lycia from 43 to 48, been consul in 49, and been made a patrician and an augur. He reversed the policy of standing on the existing borders and attacked the Silures, then died within the year.

His will flattered Nero and claimed that two more years would have given him the whole island. The speed with which his successor took Wales is read as a sign that Veranius had already done much of the work. Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, who had been the first Roman commander to take troops across the Atlas Mountains, became governor in 58. For two years the western campaigns went well.

Around 60 or 61 he attacked Mona, Anglesey, a refuge for fugitives and a stronghold of the druids. Boudica of the Iceni rose while he was there. Camulodunum was destroyed, the Ninth under Petillius Cerialis was routed, and Suetonius abandoned Londinium and then lost Verulamium as well. He fought with about 10,000 men in a defile whose place is not agreed, somewhere along Watling Street.

Cassius Dio numbered the Britons at 230,000. Tacitus heard that almost 80,000 Britons were killed, against 400 Romans. Boudica died by poison. The punitive follow-up was harsh enough that the procurator Classicianus warned Nero, and Suetonius was recalled in favour of Publius Petronius Turpilianus.

In the Derby narrative, by the time of Veranius and Paulinus the role of Strutt's Park was to keep the peace rather than to fight a front-line war.

The north was a separate problem, and it is the problem that explains why a fort on the Derwent still mattered. The Brigantes were the largest people in Britain, centred on the Pennines and Yorkshire, with Isurium Brigantum at Aldborough as their Roman capital and Eboracum, York, inside their territory. They were bordered to the south by the Corieltauvi and the Cornovii, and to the east by the Parisi. Cartimandua, or Cartismandua, was their queen from about AD 43 until about 69, and she is known through Tacitus.

She may have been one of the eleven kings who surrendered to Claudius, or she may have come to power after the Brigantian unrest of 48. Tacitus calls her birth illustrious. She and her husband Venutius were loyal and defended by Roman arms. In 51 she handed over Caratacus.

She later divorced Venutius and took his armour-bearer, Vellocatus, as consort. In 57, during the governorship of Aulus Didius Gallus, Venutius made war on her. Cohorts were sent, the fighting was indecisive until Caesius Nasica arrived with the Ninth, and the rebels were defeated. In 69, in the year of the four emperors, Venutius rose again.

Rome could spare only auxiliaries. Cartimandua was evacuated, Venutius kept the kingdom, and the war was left to Rome. She then disappears from the record.

The Derby accounts compress that northern crisis into a single notice around AD 74: the lands north of the Mersey became unstable, and Cartimandua asked for Roman help against a rebellion. Her own life does not use the year 74. It puts the appeal and the loss of her throne in 69, and an earlier war in 57. Both statements are kept.

What they share is that a client kingdom on the Pennines broke, and that the forts south of it, including the one on the Derwent, were part of the line that had to live with the consequences. After Vespasian became emperor, Quintus Petillius Cerialis was sent to begin the conquest of the Brigantes. It took decades. The poet Juvenal, early in the second century, still has a father tell his son to win glory by destroying the forts of the Brigantes.

Gnaeus Julius Agricola was born on 13 June 40 at Forum Julii in Gaul and died on 23 August 93. He served his military tribunate in Britain under Suetonius Paulinus from 58 to 62 and almost certainly took part in the suppression of Boudica. In 71, under Cerialis, he campaigned against the Brigantes while in command of the Twentieth. He was suffect consul in 76 or 77, and one account says he was made consul and governor in 77 and arrived in Britain in the middle of that summer.

The Derby narrative makes him governor in AD 78. His own life says he found, on arrival, that the Ordovices of north Wales had nearly wiped out the Roman cavalry in their country, and that he defeated them and took Anglesey, which Paulinus had had to leave in 60. In the summer of 79 he pushed to the estuary of the Taus, usually read as the Firth of Tay. The Derby account says that in 78 he reconquered north Wales and in 79 conquered the Brigantes and the Parisi, called the Parisii in the Strutt's Park narrative, and took northern England up to the present Scottish border.

The Parisi were a people of the East Riding of Yorkshire, known from a short notice in Ptolemy, often linked with the Arras burials, and placed near Petuaria at Brough. Agricola was recalled in 85 after an unusually long command. In the summer of 83, or in AD 84 in the summary of the conquest, he defeated Calgacus at Mons Graupius. Tacitus, his son-in-law, gives the Caledonians more than 30,000 men, and the dead as about 10,000 on their side and 360 on the Roman side.

Tacitus was born about AD 56 and died about 120. His biography of Agricola is the main written account of that governorship, and it is openly laudatory. The Derby pages rely on it for the sequence of campaigns, and they are explicit that excavation, not a text, dates the forts.

Strutt's Park, if it had been built against the Brigantes, was less necessary once that people had been conquered. It was replaced by a fort at Little Chester, on the east bank, directly on the line of Ryknild Street. Little Chester, also called Chester Green after the open ground at its centre, lies about 0.6 miles north of the centre of Derby. The fort protected the river crossing and stood at the junction of roads.

Ryknield Street is named as the most important, the road from Gloucester and the west toward Yorkshire and the north-east. Five Roman roads are claimed for the junction. The fort of about AD 80 lasted about forty years and was then decommissioned. One statement says Derventio was occupied for those forty years until around 120.

It was later reoccupied for a further twenty-five years. In that second military use the defensive bank and timber palisade were remodelled and stone gates were built. The site then lay empty until the late third century, when a stone wall was built around the town. The walled town did not outlive the end of the fourth century.

The modern Old Chester Road cuts through the fort, and in the nineteenth century a line of the Great Northern Railway clipped its south-east corner. Little of the Roman settlement shows above ground. Two wells remain, one on Marcus Street and one in the garden of the vicarage of St Paul's Church. Excavation has found an underfloor heating system, a hypocaust, on Parker's Piece, and a quantity of coins.

Stukeley's plan of the wall enclosed about 120 paces east to west and 100 paces north to south, and he said the foundation of the bridge could be felt with a staff. In 1817 the piers were said to be feelable in a dry summer.

The only ancient list that names the place is the Ravenna Cosmography of the seventh century, which enters Derbentione between Lutudarum, at Crich in Derbyshire, and Salinae at Middlewich. The name has been explained from words for an oak and for a market settlement. That is the name of Little Chester, not a separate ancient name recorded for the racecourse kilns. The racecourse settlement is the industrial dependent of that named place.

Hadrian's visit is dated differently, and the difference sits on top of the fort's first abandonment. The Derby accounts say the emperor visited Britannia in AD 120 and ordered his wall, and that Derventio's first occupation ran until about that year. Hadrian's own life places the British journey in 122. Before he arrived, the province had suffered a major rebellion in 118 and 119.

An expeditio Britannica moved large numbers of troops, including a detachment of some 3,000 soldiers, and coin legends of 119 and 120 show Quintus Pompeius Falco sent to restore order. In 122 Hadrian began a wall to separate Romans from barbarians. Whether the wall answered a present threat, a wish to stop expanding, or a wish to cheapen the defence is not settled. One purpose suggested for it was to keep the Brigantes from dealing with peoples further north.

A rising of the Brigantes has also been offered as a reason for the disappearance of the Ninth, which had been stationed at York, though that remains a suggestion. After the visit, the Derby accounts say that Britain still held a large garrison but that the emphasis changed toward industrial production. Derby made pottery, had access to the lead mines of the Peak District to the north, and later became a centre of metalworking. That industrial life is said to have continued for the next 200 years.

The racecourse settlement is the place where that industrial life can be seen in the ground. One account founds it around AD 90. The scheduling says pottery shows that industry began when the settlement was created, about AD 90, and lasted until the mid-second century, when metalworking became the main work and continued until the settlement declined in the mid-fourth century. The period given for the vicus in one monument record is AD 80 to 350, and in the cemetery record AD 90 to 350.

The account of the 1974 excavation says the industrial settlement grew up beside the Roman road, beginning about AD 80, with pottery kilns serving the garrison at Little Chester. Pottery production then ceased in the mid-second century, smithing was the principal activity, and occupation ended by the mid-fourth century. The start is therefore either about 80 or about 90. The end of potting in the mid-second century, and the decline of the settlement in the mid-fourth, are the points on which the accounts agree.

Potters elsewhere in the district belong to the same craft but not to this settlement. Kilns are recorded to the north, on the opposite side of the Derwent along the probable road to Buxton, at Hazelwood, at Shottle Hall, and two at Holbrook. Concentrations of Derbyshire ware mark two or three kilns near Shottlegate, about 800 metres west-north-west of kilns at Jenny Tang in Hazelwood, noted in 1970. The racecourse kilns are the Derby potteries proper, on the playing fields.

Attention was first drawn to the racecourse when Romano-British sherds were found. A trial excavation in 1967 established three kilns. Rustic ware indicated late first-century or early second-century activity. A samian sherd, together with shapes that imitated samian, suggested that one deposit was sealed in the first half of the second century.

In 1968 ten Trajanic kilns of updraught type were excavated, the work associated with Gregory. The products included lid-seated jars in a fabric similar to Derbyshire ware, rustic-ware jars, and beakers. A mortarium waster of the potter Septiminus, who was working in the early second century, had been built into one kiln. Samian from the filling of the kilns fits abandonment in AD 110 to 120.

During that 1968 digging a skeleton was found in the flue of one of the smaller kilns. The burial is probably contemporary with the abandonment, about AD 120. Two brooches, one of dolphin type and one of aucissa type, were found in 1967 by Brassington in a field in the north-western part of Racecourse Park and passed to Derby Museum.

In 1972 and 1973 six further kilns were excavated, in two groups. Two were of the early second century and shared a stokehole. That stokehole and one kiln had been badly disturbed by unauthorised digging. The other early kiln was built partly over a filled-in well that contained pottery older than the kiln.

Two more kilns were Antonine and shared a stokehole. Beside that stokehole, and partly cut by it, lay a small kiln whose oven was only 0.46 metres across. A further kiln, of which only the furnace survived, was of a first-century type, and what remained of it had been partly destroyed when one of the Antonine kilns was built. The main products were jars, bowls, and dishes.

Oxidised black-burnished sherds were found in the furnace chamber of the first-century kiln. Other finds included brooches, pins, and glass. Most of the material from the kiln excavations is now in Derby Museum or at Nottingham University. When pottery production ceased in the mid-second century, the abandoned potters' ground was taken over by other industrial working.

The seasons of 1969 and 1973, carried out by the Trent Valley Archaeological Research Committee around the kilns Gregory had dug in 1968, found pits, hearths, and post-holes, but no pattern that could be read as a plan of buildings. A ditch parallel to the Roman road and north of it was excavated, and it fixed another point on the road. A separate notice of 1968 work, close to the kiln site, records timber buildings of the late Antonine period, one of which had burned down. Those buildings partly overlay a ditch 1.5 metres wide and 2.5 metres deep, running roughly parallel to the Sawley road and north of it.

The ditch seemed to have been filled deliberately, and the pottery in it was early Antonine.

In the summer of 1974 Josephine Dool directed an eleven-week excavation for the museum, on a Romano-British industrial settlement already damaged by ploughing. Traces of timber buildings were found, with two pottery kilns, six wells, and a metal-working hearth. An account of work in October 1974, again under Dool and undertaken before a new road was built, describes the same kind of damage from cultivation: the above-ground structures and the stratified deposits had been largely destroyed. A cobbled surface on the north side of the Roman road was dated by pottery to the later third or fourth century.

South of the road were patches of cobbles, badly cut about and not datable. Occupation had concentrated on the frontages. The density of features fell away behind them. Many features could not be given a function.

That October account names two wells and two pottery kilns, about twenty hearths or furnaces, and other evidence of metalworking. The summer account names six wells and two kilns. The figures are left as they stand. Hearths and furnaces of several kinds, some at least for ironworking, were uncovered in the 1974 season.

The reading of the whole industrial sequence is that potting served the garrison from the foundation, that potting ended in the mid-second century, and that smithing continued until occupation ceased by the mid-fourth century.

Brooches from Dool's 1974 excavation of the industrial area were classified as seven Colchester derivatives, one headstud, one trumpet, three plates, two pennanulars, and one fragment. Gregory's 1968 excavation produced one Colchester derivative, one plate, one pennanular, and one fragment. A cylindrical glass flask, natural greenish in colour, for perfume or unguent, was found on the racecourse playing fields during the kiln excavations. Flasks of that kind often accompany the cremation burials of women.

It passed into the possession of a former resident. A green-glazed jug fired at the settlement is in Derby Museum. A Roman spout in the shape of a duck's head, found at the racecourse, is in the same museum. They are recorded as separate objects.

The cemetery was found immediately east of the industrial quarter. Its western edge was bordered by the pottery kilns Brassington excavated, the notice says in 1971. The eastern edge was not found. In 1978 the parks department, while stripping topsoil, uncovered the Romano-British cemetery, and the work began with Derby City Museum before passing to the Trent Valley Archaeological Research Committee.

Hazel Wheeler's report divides what was dug into three parts. A line of five mausolea and a jug burial, also described as an amphora burial, ran parallel to the Roman road and 7 metres north of it, begun in the late first or early second century. One mausoleum had a timber predecessor. A sixth mausoleum could be seen in the side of the excavation.

A walled enclosure 12 metres square held inhumations and cremations, some of the bodies mutilated or prone. One notice puts that enclosure 20 metres to the north and dates its building to about 100 to 150. Another puts the walled area 38 metres north of the road and not parallel to it. Between the enclosure and the mausolea were cremations and inhumations, among them three burials of the mid-second century, at least one of them military.

The scheduling describes an open cemetery north of the five mausolea, with both cremation and inhumation, three of the burials containing military dress-fittings, and a walled cemetery a little further north with a mixture of the two rites. The mausolea stood in ground that looked like earlier occupation, agriculture, or a roadside accumulation. A few Iron Age sherds were in that soil, and no feature was demonstrably earlier. The ground seems to have been free when the cemetery was designated, and it went back to agriculture after burial stopped.

The cemetery was used for the same span as the settlement. There is no evidence of any burial after the Roman period. Wheeler's excavation of 1978 and 1979 produced one Colchester-derivative brooch, one headstud, and two brooches left unclassified.

In 1990, twenty-two trenches, each 20 metres by 2 metres, were dug as a trial, with smaller areas taken down by hand. Most deposits had been truncated, especially on the west of the site. On the east, deposits survived in places only 0.2 metres below the surface. The scheduling, made in the same period, excluded the modern goalposts and recorded the excavations of 1968 to 1974 as the basis for understanding a pottery industry from about AD 90, metalworking until a mid-fourth-century decline, and the cemetery just described.

A wider statement says the site was excavated between 1968 and 1983. The trial of 1967, the cemetery of 1978 and 1979, and the trenches of 1990 sit outside that span, and they are part of the same history of digging.

The most recent find that touches this ground was not made on the racecourse. In August 2025 and August 2026 a training excavation on Darley Playing Fields at Little Chester, the Roman town by the Derwent, uncovered coins, pieces of pottery, and a jar of cremated remains. Students worked with amateur archaeologists and with Derby Museums. The dig sat near Ryknild Street.

Laura Parker, the project lead, said that a trowel in that ground meets pottery at once, and that the coins were small and worn and had not been touched for 1,600 years. Parts of the town had been excavated in 2013 and 2014, when test trenches for a flood scheme found a well-built Roman road, and nearby buildings, workshops, and metalworking, including iron tools and millstones, were also recorded. Parker's particular find was a small sherd that still held a fingerprint. She said it had been made on the racecourse playing field, or in Belper, in AD 120, and that the fingerprint was the potter's, potentially 1,800 years old.

The making-place is therefore either this settlement or Belper, and the date she gives, AD 120, falls in the years when the racecourse kilns were being given up or were still at work, depending on which abandonment figure is used. The coins, the cremation jar, the workshops, and the millstones belong to the dig at Little Chester, not to the racecourse trenches.

Little Chester remained inhabited after the Roman town. Angles settled there next. Chester Green is named in written records in 1495 and has been a public park since 1866. Little Chester was a township in the parish of St Alkmund, became a separate civil parish in 1866, and on 26 March 1898 was merged into Derby.

In 1891 the parish had 966 people. The racecourse ground, once clear enough for a cemetery and later ploughed, became playing fields. The Roman objects stayed in the museum of the later town.

That museum also holds what later Derby kept of its own people, alongside the Roman jug and the duck-headed spout. Alfred E. Goodey, born in Derby on 3 April 1878 and dead there on 7 April 1945, spent his life gathering paintings, prints, and photographs of Derby. His parents were William Henry Goodey and Rhoda, whose family name was Strutt.

In 1936 he gave more than 500 paintings to Derby Museum and Art Gallery, and he left further works and £13,000 toward an extension. Alfred John Keene, a watercolour painter born in 1864 and dead in 1930, was the fourth son of the photographer Richard Keene and a founder, in 1887, of the Derby Sketching Club. Goodey bought seventy-seven of his paintings, and they went to the museum with the rest of the gift. Andrew Planche, also recorded as André, a jeweller and potter born on 14 March 1728 to Huguenot parents and buried at Bath in January 1805, was making small porcelain in Derby by the age of seventeen.

On 1 January 1756 he entered a partnership with John Heath and William Duesbury to make English china on Nottingham Road, the works that became Royal Crown Derby, and he left for London before that year was out. A model of 1752 in the museum, a Chinaman and a boy, belongs to the dry-edge years from 1750 to 1756. His brother Jacques worked as an assistant to Benjamin Vulliamy. Benjamin Vulliamy, born in 1747 and dead on 31 December 1811, was appointed King George III's clockmaker in 1773.

From about 1780 until 1884 his regulator at the Kew observatory was the main timekeeper there and the official regulator of London time. The family used Crown Derby porcelain for figures on clocks, and some of his work is in Derby Museum. Charles Sylvester, christened at Sheffield on 10 July 1774 and dead in 1828, moved to Derby in 1807 and worked with William Strutt on the heating and ventilation of the new infirmary, which he described in 1819. He and Strutt belonged to the Derby Philosophical Society associated with Erasmus Darwin.

Arthur Keily, born in Derby on 18 March 1921 and dead on 2 March 2016, was a marathon runner who won eleven of twenty-seven marathons and set nine world records. The museum displays medals from his career. None of these lives is evidence for how the Roman kilns were used. They show what the city did with the memory of its own ground, and where the racecourse jug and the duck-headed spout ended up.